Staska.Net

Every personal improvement expert will tell you that setting and achieving goals is a key to success. And if you are just getting in to blogging for money, or any other online money making venture, realistic and ambitious goal setting is a must.

But if you are just starting and haven’t done anything yet, how do you know what goals to set yourself? Saying that I want to be earning $10 a day, have 1000 daily visitors and 500 subscribers in a month is all good and well. But is it a goal or just a wish?

If you have some previous online experience, it might be a real and achievable goal. You know what’s it like online.

But if you are just starting , it’s very likely just a wish. The problem with these kinds of goals is that most of the results are beyond your control.

Do you know how readers will react to your writing? Do you have any realistic expectation how your blog promotion activities will fare? Do you know what an average AdSense click will bring you? How likely are your visitors to click on the ad or buy affiliate products from you?

And what happens if after a month you check stats and see that you have less then 50 unique readers a day, only 25 subscribers and are earning less then a dollar a day? Isn’t that one of the reasons why so many blogs are abandoned after a few weeks?

After running a number of blogs for more then a year, I now have a better idea of what level of traffic/earnings I could achieve with a new blog. But when setting goals for it I still do not think in terms of visitors, number of subscribers or Technorati rank.

The only goals I set myself are:

• I will do it for at least 1 month.
• I will write at least x posts a week
• I will spend at least x hours a day learning and trying new things
• I will make progress evaluation every week

Of course I check my stats, Alexa and Technorati ranks daily. But only as an indicators of my progress, not as some goals or milestones to be achieved.

Then, after a month, I sit down and look at the results. The first question I ask myself is - how do I feel writing about the topic? I look at the amount of effort I have to put in, my stats, earnings, promotion activities, possibilities for growth. Then I make a decision if I want to continue.

Only after that I start thinking about the milestones in terms of traffic, earnings or backlinks. But by then I have a first hand knowledge of various promotion opportunities, stickiness of the topic, the average click price and affiliate sales possibilities. And I have the best benchmark to measure my progress against - last month results.

So what goals you set yourself when you started blogging?

P.S. Interestingly enough, a day I published this post, Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger) decided to post on the same topic. For a take of real blogging pro on this issue check here: Do you have blog goals?